Celebrating Joe Duggan’s epic career as teacher, scholar, and dean

Professor of French and Comparative Literature, renowned medieval scholar, and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division: these all, over multiple decades, have described Joseph J. Duggan. One more word applies at this juncture: retired. On June 30, Duggan handed over the reins of his associate deanship, having previously retired in 2005 from his formal teaching duties in two departments. (And indeed having tried to retire from the Graduate Division as well in 2005, only to be recalled for another half-dozen years.)

The words posted here are excerpted from a separate web page, hosted by the Graduate Division, that celebrates not only his long and vital tenure there, but his entire career, in words and pictures. On that page, friends, colleagues, and students are warmly invited to contribute anecdotes, recollections, appreciations, and pictures from times with Joe over the years. Leave a message for Joe.

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JOE DUGGAN is his own time machine. During his career at Berkeley, he has effortlessly (and elegantly) transported himself between the 12th-century world of medieval Europe via his internationally renowned scholarly work, and the 21st century, where, as of June 30, he has completed 24 years of brilliant academic administration as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division — the longest tenure period of any faculty member in that role.

When he first arrived at Berkeley as an assistant professor, at the age of 25 — younger than many of the graduate students he encountered here — he modeled his instruction of such subjects as “The Medieval Book: Editing Texts from Medieval Manuscripts” and “The Troubadours and the Troubadour Tradition,” after a guiding professor he had in graduate school at Ohio State, who “divided each class into discrete parts, sometimes minuscule parts, three minutes or 15 minutes each, and he told us exactly what we had to teach in each section of the hour.”

(Click the arrow in the lower right corner to start the slideshow)

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As Associate Dean of the Graduate Division, Joe Duggan has also been attentive to the passage of time. He has helped advise the Graduate Council, which sets policy for matters pertaining to graduate study, on how to improve what is known in graduate education as “time to degree” — how long it takes graduate students to complete their degrees. And when Joe Duggan began as Associate Dean for the Graduate Division, he had nearly 8,800 students (and recently, more than 10,000) whose progress to degree completion he would try to facilitate through policy and its implementation. From the beginning, he embarked on what would be a virtuoso tenure the range of which may never again be repeated. He oversaw all aspects of admissions, degree progress, student appointments (meaning jobs, such as GSI, GSR, and the like), the training of graduate student instructors, and early incarnations of data processing. He also administered enrollment quotas for what were then 96 degree-granting units (now 101), requiring, as he said in his understated way, “considerable negotiating,” all the while balancing relative equity across programs and remaining mindful of resource constraints.

Not a habitual seeker of power over the fates of others, Duggan nevertheless found a lot of it in his hands: “about forty student files cross my desk every week, requiring decisions.” (A total even he found difficult to believe — “but my administrative assistant keeps a log.”) If you needed an exception to regulations — “including those involving the appointment of Qualifying Examination and dissertation committees” — you had to get it from Associate Dean Joseph J. Duggan. He ruled on all graduate student academic and appointment exceptions, and counseled students who brought him their varied and complex problems.

Those fortunate enough to have watched Joe’s work closely soon saw that fairness and compassion are some of the deepest veins in the Duggan Lode (as colleagues note in comments below this text). He took extraordinary care to ensure and enforce fair-dealing in disputes between students and faculty or administrators that occasionally arise. Even in the push and pull over graduate student union contracts, Joe remained true to form. After one such GSI contract round nearly a decade ago, his boss at the time, Dean Mary Ann Mason, said, “no one has put in more time at the table negotiating better conditions for GSIs. Although he represented the university, he always had first in his mind the best interests of the GSIs.”

Duggan leaves a specific enduring legacy in the Graduate Division He was “the driving force” in establishing the GSI Teaching and Resource Center in 1989, says its current director, Linda von Hoene. The center has been under his guidance and deanly wing since its humble beginnings as “a one-desk operation in the basement of California Hall.” It is now a thriving necessity on the third floor of Sproul Hall (and beyond) that has received numerous awards and has been singled out by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges as “a model for GSI development programs everywhere.” Its programs have been emulated across the U.S. and as far away as Japan and China. (For more about the programs, see this feature on the GSI Center.)

“Joe Duggan understood earlier than most,” says von Hoene, “that learning to teach is an important component of graduate education and that undergraduates benefit from the intellectual engagement with graduate students. He also understood that to teach well, GSIs need guidance, mentorship, and an environment in which they can flourish both as teachers and scholars.” For a faculty member who never employed a GSI for one of his courses, because they were mainly seminar-sized, Joe showed deep appreciation of, and imaginative insight into, this aspect of graduate training.

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IN 2008, nearly three years after retiring from the faculty in two departments — assuming the emeritus faculty title of Professor of the Graduate School and remaining in thrall to the habit of research — Duggan became Berkeley’s first recipient of the University of California systemwide Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship, a one-year appointment that came with a generous financial award, to be used to support teaching, research, public service, or as a salary stipend. It gave Duggan the opportunity to focus on and edit Garin le Loherain, another medieval chanson de geste replete with “fierce and sanguinary” battles, heathens and the faithful, and treachery most foul.

Magnum opus: La Chanson de Roland, 2006, J. J. Duggan (ed.)

Duggan’s method involves transcribing line by line from the source. A manuscript of Garin de Loherain has been available in the Bancroft Library since 1968. The poem is 16,000 lines long. Duggan copied the ancient writing from microfilm, adding punctuation, quotation marks, and capitals, all of which are missing in the original text. Then the work requiring real thought begins, analyzing the language and adding annotations to explain aspects that might baffle modern scholars.

Here Duggan’s time machine turns on at full power, allowing him to leave the present day and become totally immersed in the tumult of medieval Europe. “I can walk away from the modern world into a library,” he says, “and I’m back in the 13th century dealing with the problems of that period. It’s tremendous fun.” Joe is one of the world’s experts on the period, and in particular he devoted 21 years to an edition of The Song of Roland, the first great epic poem in French literature. Roland was Charlemagne’s nephew, and such were his travails that — giving away the ending — when his thousands of loyal troops were slaughtered by a pagan horde 20 times their number, he blew his head apart sounding a warning by elephant-tusk horn to his faraway emperor uncle, who rode with his army to obliterate the enemy. Not a story for the squeamish.

Nor, for that matter, are the demands of two dozen years in the Graduate Division…